ifill. tonight, on "washington week." >> together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis. we can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is stronger. john: mr. obama tells congress and the nation he's got big ideas. >> i propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in america. i propose a "fix it first" program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs. raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. john: republicans see it as a sign to balloon the government. >> to make it to the middle class no matter where you start out in life, it isn't bestowed to us by washington. >> what's next? >> gabby giffords deserves a vote. the families of newtown deserve

a vote! the families of aurora deserve a vote! john: covering the week, karen tumulty of "the washington post," todd purdum of "vanity fair," jeff zeleny with "the new york times," and eamon javers of cnbc. >> award-winning reporting and analysis, covering history as it happens, live, from our nation's capital, this is "washington week" with gwen ifill. corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by --. >> we went out and asked people a simple question, how old is the oldest person you've known? we gave people a sticker and had them show us. we learned a lot of us have known someone who's lived well into their 90's and that's a great thing but one thing that hasn't changed is the official retirement age. the question is, how do you make sure you have the money you need

to enjoy all of these years? >> additional corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by boeing. additional funding is provided by the annenberg foundation, the corporation for public broadcasting and by contribution to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. once again, live from washington, sitting in for gwen ifill this week, john dickerson of "slate magazine" and cbs news john: good evening, this week, president obama gave the first state-of-the-union address of his second term. it was packed with almost 30 different policy proposals, some, like immigration reform, were familiar. others, like his call for expanding preschool and rating colleges, were new. it was a robust vision for a president engaged in hand-to-hand combat

congressional republicans over the basic exchanges of government. still, the president said the country could afford all of it. >> nothing i'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. it is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth. john: , so, karen, if bill clinton kind the famous phrase that the era of big government over, did president obama launch the era of smart government? >> that's going to depend on what side of the aisle you were sitting on when you listened to the speech. but one thing about the speech, there was just a lot in it. he touched every single domestic policy initiative he has ever put together before, even the things that sounded sort of new -- minimum wage, raising it to $9 an hour.

in his first campaign, he campaigned on raising it to $9.50 an hour by 2011 but what really came through to me in that speech was his declaration that essentially after two years of doing nothing but fighting with republicans over deficit reduction, he was no longer going to have deficit reduction define policy setting in washington. he said a balanced budget is an important thing but it is not the same as an economic plan. and i think he did that, in part, because the deficit has begun to come down but also because he realizes that has constrained him in doing a lot of other things he wants to do in his second term joiment todd, you wrote that the president was sharp and focused. what was his tone in delivering his pitch? >> he was frank in saying we can't cut our way to prosperity and we in the newspaper and journalism business have experience with that but he was very direct. if people thought his second inaugural was perhaps overly

harshly partisan, i think this was was as firm a tone and some of these ideas are ideas that in the past republicans have supported so he was self possessed but he said i'm not going to keep playing rope-a-dope with you, here's my plan. john: on minimum wage, he mentioned mitt romney, saying this was an idea the two agreed on. jeff, you've covered president obama since he was state senator obama. we're seeing and taking new sound bgs this new president in his second term how he was different from his first term. did we learn anything about the new second term approach? >> it was more of a confident air. it wasn't the most poetic speech but i think that was a sign that it was as karen and todd have said, just chock-full of ideas. he saved the illirricle things

on gun control for the end but it seemed to me he came in with's clear purpose that he knows time is limited, he knows he has shorter than a four-year term, he knows all these things won't happen but a challenge for the white house is giving a state of the union a couple of weeks after he's sworn in and after the inaugural address so it wasn't as lirricle but i was struck by his confident air, walking into the chamber. he seemed more sure of himself and on climate and energy, he knows if anything happen on those, it will be because of executive action, not because of people in the room. it's interesting to watch who's applauding and who's not but the senate democrat -- mark pryor from arkansas, mary landers from louisiana, and a few others, will not want to vote on this because they're up for election

in 2014 so we focus on republicans but it was a message for democrats, as well. john: he friday congress doesn't move, i will. eamon, i want to talk to you about the specifics. we'll talk about what was in the speech. let's talk about minimum wage. this was new in the speech although he supported it before. what's the economics behind that, what are the chances that minimum wage is going to come and is it a good idea? >> it's probably a long shot politically to get this thing done. minimum wage now is $7.25 an hour. the president would like it to go to $9 an hour. a lot of states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage now and what a wage should be in a given market varies across the country a lot based on the economy in that local area. typically you find big companies have more ability to absorb the costs of minimum wage increase

and it's the small business lobby that really agitates against it so it's an uphill push. many republicans will argue, all this will do is make jobs more expensive for employers to create and therefore we'll create fewer jobs and we have to resist this. obama thinks this will play well with his political base and i like jeff's point about, a lot of these ideas are not necessarily going to pass, that the president was talking about. so you ask the question, why would a president talk about a lot of things that aren't going to pass, and i think it's to create a patina across his whole presidency that's appealing to a lot of different voters by checking a lot of different boxes and that helps you with the one thing do you need to do and that's they is -- sequester fight coming up on march 1 and the tactical decisions he needs to make are fares he has the public behind him. john: karen, in the speech, what box was he trying to check with the preschool, expanding

preschool? that was another new policy proposal here. >> on thursday i sat through three hours of watching focus groups with a demographic the pollsters begun to call the wal-mart mom, swing women voters, and of all the proposals brought up in the speech, when they heard about the jobs proposals, they've heard this so many times and as the woman who conducted the focus group said, she said it's almost like they have ear muffs on, they don't believe it anymore. the minimum wage, they had almost a negative reaction to. one woman says i get more than that from unemployment and people might have to lay people off but universal preschool got a bigger response from them than any other proposal and they believe the research that says that kids who begin education early do better in life and they all were also able to relate the

stories of their own children and that was something i think that women voters in particular could really relate to and see a very tangible benefit from. >> if it doesn't come through, are they going to hold it against the president or has he generated warm feelings by talking about the issue whether or not it happens? >> i thinks that one of the things where they will give him credit for having a good idea. if he doesn't push it hard enough or congress can't find the money for it, it might be a different story. john: that's the question, anywhere from $8 billion to $100 billion over 10 years to pay for that and it seems no republicans are interested in paying for that. i want to ask you about the end of the president's speech on guns in which we saw him talking about it. that was the most emotionally powerful moment of the speech. >> clearly for him and ever since sandy hook, you have a feeling he has not made guns a focus of his public career ever, and i couldn't help, feeling in

the aftermath of sandy hook, when he gave that emotional speech, that he felt guilty for that because if left to his own devices, it would be a very important issue for him and the incident in chicago where the young woman was killed must have landed home in another way. that's another example why -- where he said he would fight as hard as he could so if he get universal background checks, gun control. maybe he doesn't get a ban on assault weapons. he can say he's done something important and i think he'd be happy to have six months from now or three months from now, that in his out basket. >> john: we've talked about what was in the president's speech. the president is not alone in this divided government. marco rube -- rubio gave the

government response to the speech. >> more government isn't going to help you get ahead. it's going to hold you back. more government isn't going to create more opportunities. it's going to limit them. and more government isn't going to inspire more ideas, new businesses and new private sector jobs. going to create uncertainty. john: house republican leader john boehner sat behind the president during the speech and did not stir a muscle in any way that might be mistaken for approving of the president's ideas. this was the reaction from mr. boehner the next day. last night, the president offered up more of the same -- higher taxes and more stimulus spending and we're weeks away from the president's sequester and the president laid out no plan to eliminate the sequester and the harmful cuts that will come as a result of it. john: eamon, any of the things the president talked about going to pass? >> i think he's got a fight on his hands. republicans, as you saw, just

from the body language of speaker boehner sitting behind the president, republicans are not in a mood to offer him any major wins here. i don't think they feel they need to except perhaps on immigration which runs on a separate political track so the president is proposing these things. they're not really going to get done and it reminds me of bill clinton going small ball towards the end of his presidency. >> the criticism of the republican response, i think, was that they were still criticizing barack obama's ideas but there really wasn't a lot there offered in terms of their own ideas and in that sense, you really sort of think that maybe they missed an opportunity here. john: jeff, there were two responses there from senator rubio and -- what was the response? >> that was the best example of the republican party is still a bit divided. senator rubio who is now the establishment republican, he, of course, ran in 2010 as sort of a

tea party candidate but there was also a response from senator rand paul so we saw an early preview to the republican primary in 2016 but i think karen's right. we didn't hear new ideas from senator rubio but mitt romney could not have delivered that speech. he could not have said my father was a bartender, he came over here. it was repackaged a bit but biography is an important thing as we saw in 2006 and 2007 with a young senator from illinois. the republican response is a pro forma thing. we probably would have forgotten who had given it if marco rubio hasn't reached for his bottle of water. but that aside, i think -- rand paul was more aggressive in his tone against the pot drones, on spending, on the budget. i think we'll see the republican

party, not a unified response. we'll see if it was a smart idea a few years from now for senator rubio to be giving this speech or not. he was carrying the burdens of the republican party. like karen said, talking a lot about barack obama, trying to defeat the president. he won. his agenda may not get through but he's president for at least four more years. >> the president started his speech with a quote from kennedy. he said, "the constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress." but he does not -- the white house doesn't think he has a willing partner so what's he doing? >> you're exactly right. he doesn't face anything like the geopolitical situation john kennedy faced 50 years ago. he was able to get republicans to help him on questions of civil rights because the southern democrats were opposed to that and cross-party coalitions were necessary for the internal reasons of the parties themselves. know how much money president obama would have to spend to influence those house

members who have no pressure in their districts to support him on questions like gun control but feel opposite pressures and ran well ahead of him in their districts. there are only 15 members of the republican caucus in whose districts president obama won last year. so i think he has a terribly -- if they want to spend a lot of money, maybe they should spend it on re-districting in 2020 and change dynamics. >> the president hit the road three days this week trying to sell these proposals. he tried that in 2009 using his campaign apparatus. they say they'll do it again. what will be different? >> i think the president has said all along he is going to -- he's given up on the idea that you can change the way washington works so he's going to try to make the country change the way washington works but i did think one thing was interesting in the speech. it was almost the dog that didn't bark. he talked about immigration but not with the kind of passion that he talked about some of these other issues and that's

possibly because immigration is the big thing that could actually possibly happen and it might have hurt his cause to sort of wrap his arms around this at a time when he needs to give the republicans as much political flexibility and running room as he possibly can. i thought that was a pretty shrewd move. >> let's go to the sequester now. we have basically another chapter in this ongoing, as karen wrote, basically from 2010 on, we've had a weekly battle and we've got another crisis coming march 1. what's your sense of where the question of the sequester. those across-the-board cuts that kick in. >> the sequester, it was designed to be a poison pill that would be so awful, it would incentivize everyone to hold hands and make a deal but they didn't make a deal and they punched each other in the nose and they're looming over the march 1 deadline cobbled

dignitary over the christmas break. looming on march 1, it's a huge crisis, enormous spending cuts and could result to a hefty drag to g.d.p. for the following year, $85 billion in cuts for the first year. what happened as a result of that, congress went on vacation. they'll be out of town until a couple of legislative days before that. i think that gives you all the information you need have about where we're going on the sequester. voices on left and the right are saying let's just have they is querst and get it over with. it's a meat cleaver, not a scalpel but it's a spending cut for those folks on the right who want to see spending cuts at all. >> we might agree that everyone gets embarrassed when they leave town with business to be done but who gets the blame here if the sequester happens, the big cuts happen, people are hurting. is there any sense? >> congressman boehner tried to call it the president's

sequester. i'm not sure how that's fair since it was congress that passed the measure. secretary napolitano testified twice. she had to explain how harmful to border security the equivalent of 5,000 border patrol agents the sequester cuts would be. she said she had an out-of-body experience doing that and i think the republicans have a history, they did it in 1995 and 1996 with bill clinton, again with impeachment. i think they have a history of overplaying their hand and i do think the president has set them up to look intransigent and i think that's part of the rationale for the speech the other night. we'll see who gets the bigger blame. >> karen, you covered that last blow up with republicans. do you see that same parallel? there are now a lot of republicans who are happy to see the sequester go through because it's actually getting spending cuts although it's harmful to some republicans and their

districts. >> in some ways, in a lot of ways, i think the stakes are higher now than they were in 1995 when the government shut down. then it was a case of, oh, you know, parks would close down for a few weeks. this is jeopardizing the economic recovery and that's a gun that they really shouldn't have -- again, it was designed to be so dire that it wouldn't happen and here it comes. >> partisanship can't rescue them from this dire situation. partisanship is also, jeff, locking them into a fight over senator hagel, chuck hagel, the president's nominee for the secretary of defense. the republicans have effectively filibustered him. what is going on here? >> what is really going to is a relitigation of what happens when a member of a party speaks out against his own party. of course, we're talking about the iraq war. chuck hagel, former republican senator from nebraska, was

asking the sharpest, hardest questions about the iraq war, throughout its duration and he, classed with his old friend, john mccain, and he's paying a price. at the end of the day, he'll probably be confirmed but he has to wait another -- until the week after next to when the senators return to washington to see if he can be confirmed so i think it's an embarrassment to the president. that's what they were trying to do in some case. but enough republicans have said that they're going to vote for him ultimately but you have to wonder, is this really going to weaken senator hagel as a possible defense secretary. all the defense ministers from around the world are meeting next week in brussels. he hoped to be at the table but secretary panetta has to stay on because of this so i think senator reed was probably right when he said this was the worst example yet of partisanship in washington but who knows. something may come up in the next week and a half that might

hurt senator hagel but the white house still seems somewhat confident but the question is how does he emerge from this? he -- everyone thought he would get through because he's a senator. but the thing is, 43 senators who are voting on him never served with chuck hagel. he's only been out of the senate for four year. he left in 2009. that's what's going on here. it's almost an entirely -- half the senate is almost entirely new so he doesn't have relationship and the relationships he has are bad joimpt so, todd, is that it, really? it's just about politics? >> it's hard to think it's about anything other than politics. senator mccain was asking the same tough questions chuck hagel was. senator mccain was a tough critic of the bush administration's execution of that war in 2003 through 2005. so i think if they're just putting it off for 10 days past the recess, it's hard to think

it's anything other than a petty political thing if they acknowledged it would eventually happen. >> to what spent was hagel's own performance in his confirmation -- his own worst enemy. this is a guy who looked unprepared and was unable to answer a lot of questions about what he would do as defense secretary. >> you have to wonder if any of the republicans would have voted for him even if he had a good performance. this is a litmus test for 2014. you see republican senators afraid of primary challenges. lindsey graham of south carolina, john cornyn in texas. the divide in the republican party is playing out in this debate. >> they have to be tough on hagel so they don't get a primary challenge saying you're not a real republican. >> senator graham is saying he wants more answers on benghazi. that has nothing to do with senator hagel. it seems to me, even some republican party elders, thinks it's not wise politics. bill cohen, former secretary of

defense, bob gates, former republican secretary of defense, says it's not good for the party or the country. >> lindsey graham may have a republican primary challenge. in the last analysis, very quickly, do you think hagel becomes the new secretary of defense? >> i think he would probably bet that he will but one thing we know, we've seen it happen time and time again, when you leave something hanging like this, you never know what is going to pop up. >> twisting in the wind. ok. jeff, karen, todd, eamon, the state of our panel is strong. thanks to all of you. that will wrap it up for all of us tonight. you can join gwen for her monthly chat next thursday at noon eastern or send questions ahead of time us to at washingtonweek@pbs.org. and also next week, "washington week" is part of the week-long pbs after newtown initiative, a series of documentaries, news reports and programs tide thougg context to the national conversation about gun violence

in america. be sure to tune in to pbs all week long. i'm john dickerson. gwen will be back at the table next week on "washington week." good night. >> corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by -- >> we know why we're here. forces to what they need when they need it. >> to help troops see danger before it sees them. >> to answer the call of the brave and bring them safely home. >> around the globe, the people

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>> tonight "live from lincoln center raises a toast" to composer john kander and lyricist fred ebb. in musicals like "chicago," "kiss of the spider woman," and "cabaret," kander and ebb mined the depths of the human heart with fearlessness and flair. shakespeare might have been the first to think it, but no one has expressed the idea that life is a cabaret more convincingly than these musical marvels. i'm audra mcdonald. please join us for "ring them bells! a kander & ebb celebration."